tender-hearted without being sentimental; he likes a rather
combative nature, and enjoys repartee more than he enjoys humour.
The Englishman values good sense above almost all qualities; by a
sensible man he means a man with a clear judgment of right and
wrong, a man who is not taken in by pretences nor gulled by
rhetoric; a man who can instinctively see what is important and what
is unimportant. But of course the chief external reason, apart from
the character of Johnson himself, for his supremacy of fame, is that
his memory is enshrined in an incomparable biography. It shows the
strange ineptness of Englishmen for literary and artistic criticism,
their incapacity for judging a work of art on its own merits, their
singular habit of allowing their disapprobation of a man's private
character to depreciate his work, that an acknowledged critic like
Macaulay could waste time in carefully considering whether Boswell
was more fool or more knave, and triumphantly announce that he
produced a good book by accident. Probably Boswell did not realise
how matchless a biographer he was, though he was not disposed to
belittle his own performances. But his unbridled interest in the
smallest details, his power of hero-worship, his amazing style, his
perception, his astonishing memory and the training he gave it, his
superb dramatic faculty, which enabled him to arrange his other
characters around the main figure, and to subordinate them all to
his central emphasis--all these qualities are undeniable. Moreover
he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast to Johnson that
could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique degree the power
of both stimulating and provoking his hero to animation and to
wrath. Boswell may not have known what an artist he was, but he is
probably one of the best literary artists who has ever lived.

But the supreme quality of his great book is this--that his